Intersection of Jewish and Queer Identities in the USSR & Today

On Wednesday, November 8th, join RUSA and CBST for an evening with professor Galina Zelenina of Russian State University for Humanities in Moscow, scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University.

This is even will be in Russian with simultaneous translation to English.

The treatment of Jews and homosexuals in Soviet and post-Soviet culture have similarities and differences: queer prose writing has identified gays as “second Jews,” and in a parallel trend, homosexuality and Jewish origins have been similarly dismissed in the Soviet context as “unfortunate accidents of birth.” Dr. Zelenina will speak about the intersections of “Kikes” & “Faggots,” and how these identities were understood in the time of the USSR and today.

Galina Zelenina is an associate professor at Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow. Her fields of research have included late medieval Sephardi Jews and Conversos, late Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry, Judaism in contemporary Russia, an intersection of Jewish and queer identities and topoi in Soviet and post-Soviet culture. She is the author of From Scepter of Judah to Buffon’s Club: Court Jews in Medieval Spain (in Russian; 2008) and has a new book on Conversos and Spanish inquisition in print. Her recent publications include the book Wissenschaft des Judentums Two: Renaissance in Portraits (in Russian; 2015) on the revival of Jewish studies in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and the edited volume Judaism after the USSR: Old and New, Religious and National. She is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University where she’s doing research on baalot teshuva (female returnees to Judaism) in Moscow Lubavitcher community.